I wish I were making this up as some sort of a pre-Purim joke. But it seems that the latest anti-Israel outrage coming out of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is its awarding a prize to a graduate student for an essay in which the student claims that Israel is abusing and oppressing Palestinians by not raping their women. Really.

Had it not been awarded a prize by a panel of the Hebrew University's distinguished professors, the whole matter could be dismissed as just another idiotic essay by a moonbat grad student, not something worthy of any attention being paid to it. But according to news reports, the essay in question has now been published by the Hebrew University's "Shaine Center," at the enthusiastic recommendation of a Hebrew University professors' committee headed by Dr. Zali Gurevitch. The latter is a radical-leftist anthropologist who taught for several years at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Don't worry, I never heard of it either.

I wonder if the Shaine family know what is being done with their contributions to the university!

The essay indicting Israeli soldiers for not raping Palestinian women was the product of the crayon of a MA student named Tal Nitzan. Tal is a she. Her main theme is that the "lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose lack of IDF rapes of Palestinian women is designed to serve a political purpose." The "political purpose" is that Israel fears the Palestinians demographically and so IDF soldiers do not rape the women to avoid creating new Palestinians and little intifaders.

Here is Nitzan at her finest:

"In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of
military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done."

Israeli racism has resulted in suppressed Jewish-male sexual desire for Palestinian women, just another manifestation of Zionist racism. Since the absence of rape of Arab women by Israeli soldiers has no parallel in any other human army in wartime anytime in history, the only conclusion must be that Jewish soldiers are far more racist and intolerant than the others.

Now Nitzan and her guru Gurevitch rule out automatically all other alternative explanations for why Israeli troops do not rape Arab women. The possibility that Israeli troops are simply civilized humans is ruled out as an imponderable. Ditto for the possibility that Jewish ethics serve to deter such abuse of Arab women.

Instead, Nitzan claims that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are "de-humanized" in the soldiers' eyes. I guess that means they are not rape worthy. You know, unlike Shulamit Aloni, Yael Dayan, and Tamar Gozansky [these 3 links added by BtB].

How did Nitzan reach these cosmic conclusions? By conducting "interviews" with 25 soldiers. That is what the Hebrew University has sunk to, regarding 25 interviews as research comprising a MA thesis.

I am willing to bet a year's salary that not a single one of those soldiers said that he was foregoing raping Arab women because he was afraid it would spawn little Palestinian intifada terrorists. So essentially Nitzan is saying that the proof that Israeli soldiers are brutal oppressive stormtroopers is in the fact that they do NOT mistreat and sexually abuse Palestinian women, not even the Palestinian terrorist women apprehended after trying to murder Jews.

And as if this were not enough, let us note that not a single one of the many radical feminist mini-organizations that plague Israel had a single moo to utter about this obviously anti-woman "research" paper inflicted upon the world by the Hebrew University.

According to her own thesis logic, if little Tal herself were to be raped by Hamas terrorists, I guess this would pretty much prove that they are egalitarian and progressive seekers of peace and justice.

Makor Rishon, a rightwing Hebrew weekly (www.makorrishon.co.il) broke the story of this Hebrew University "research" proving that Rape Refusal by Israeli soldiers serves to prove how racist they are.

The Shaine Center for Research in the Social Sciences was established in 1987 following a donation from the Shaine family, USA. Its aim is to advance research in the social sciences.

The Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology is responsible for the Center, working alongside an Academic Committee.

The Center's main purpose is to support research into a range of phenomena in Israeli society. To that end the Center offers financial support for research carried out in the Faculty for Social Sciences. About two-thirds of the distributed funds go to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology